Unsolicited Advice

  Happy Ratmas! I am puttering around the house, airing as many QI holiday episodes as I can find, until I get bored and switch to something else. https://twoseven.xyz/FrcdXZ9mKa

Direct financial news: Thanks to a GoFundMe , I have pre-paid three months of anything that will let me do that. At the very least, I will have phone service through this debacle. The city I'm in has just signed an eviction moratorium of its own, to be in effect until the health department says it's safe to turf people again (so, probably April~June). I'm calling legal aid to check, but given that every two miles is a new ZIP code in MA, and that no one sane would rent to me on my current (lack of) income, my best bet may be to stay exactly where I am until someone finds a way to remove me. I just got in touch with the person who was paying utilities and I'm going to try to negotiate paying THEM for it all, so I'm not subject to all the fees involved in transferring everything into my own name.  I've been referred to some other, smaller funds, but to be honest, I'm not sure what to apply for. The problem that I have is not a temporary matter of "I need

The drunk guy at the end of the bar keeps coming out to steal my Cheerios, then cramming himself into a grubby box to eat them.  On the other hand, all the drunk guys in the house are getting their rooms cleaned today in preparation for RATMAS REVELRIES tomorrow at 3 pm EST, on Twitch . Come see what I do for the ungrateful wombling fuzzbutts, and join us for a LIVE broadcast of Ratmas Dinner, followed by video games and ramble. Ratmas tree and gifts! Can you guess what I got them? (Food. I got them food. I get them food every year.)

Come one, come all! Celebrate the non-denominational hedonistic holiday of Ratmas with me and the denizens of Schloß Ratter on 12/20, at 3 pm. Gather your own tasty treats and nest up to join us for a cage tour of their decorations, a LIVE stream of Ratmas Dinner, and then low-pressure socially-distanced hangout time with me and some quality brain-rotting video games.  https://fb.me/e/1Wa7qFEsW http://twitch.tv/arabellaflyn/

I've got work to do and I need to not wander away from the computer before I do it. More Avengers will keep me here! Starting today at 1 pm, we continue where we left off with Series 4, starring Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee, as they deftly quip, bicker, and lightly "karate"-touch bad guys into unconsciousness, saving the world while dressed to the nines. Join me here for the fun: https://twoseven.xyz/glCbxLLnnB

 http://laneniamvidataj.rf.gd/unsolved1/play.html The URL is admittedly ugly, but the interpreter seems to work all right. Have a nose around. Type QUESTION for a URL where you can ask me about things that have not yet acquired a description.

Redundant to those who have me on other social media, but tl;dr: I need to be out of this apartment by 12/31, and the couple I was supposed to stay with temporarily just broke up. I cannot go with either. I've contacted the relevant state resources but frankly the American government is a flaming dumpster fire and I don't know what they can/will do to help. GoFundMe is here:  https://www.gofundme.com/f/k4nnj3 Life sucks. Have a picture of a rat to make up for it.

Observations: Inform 7 is still a thing. Now Vorple is also a thing. Free web hosting with FTP access, while not as common as it was twenty years ago, still exists. People are a lot more willing to click a link than wrap their head around the concept of a Z-Machine interpreter. I've no idea if this will ever amount to anything, but at least it's keeping me out of worse trouble.

I've been horribly scattered for the past several days, which, in retrospect, is because I've had a migraine off and on the whole time. The wonderful ("wonderful") thing about those is that, in addition to hurting, they also wreck your ability to logic. There's no clear picture of what causes migraines in general, assuming that they are all the same thing, but the ones I get (migraine with aura, preceded by sudden changes in cardiovascular or atmospheric pressure) are associated with cortical spreading depression . Which is essentially a rolling brownout across the outer wrapper of the brain, the part that handles sequential analysis and synthesis. It's a fun combination of an icepick to the eye socket and the nagging feeling that there's something important you really should have picked up on, but haven't. I spent Thursday night at the studio reception desk, trying like hell not to fall off my chair. Writing is damn near impossible like that, but I di

  I filmed a bunch of video intros for my Thanksgiving marathon thing. Then a bunch of "backstage" clips. Just like a real YouTuber! (I am pretending to know what I'm doing SO HARD.) And here they are. If you'd like to support my efforts to fuck around in front of a camera wearing interesting dresses until I figure this out, I have a Patreon and a PayPal donations jar. 

Those of you who have been around a while are probably wondering where the advent calendar went. If you haven't, normally what happens is I queue up a series of short daily posts for the month of December, so I can take some time away from written work to do a bunch of live performances. I have a regular stage show that goes off in early January (two, actually -- we're the double-header performed on the main stage at Arisia ), and for the past several years I've danced either a holiday show or NACHMO or both. And I tend to make most of my holiday gifts, because I'm incapable of just shopping for fancy boxes of chocolates like a normal person. This year, of course, basically none of that is happening. The Mrs Hawking productions are still running, but in a Zoom-like format, and I've already done the taping for my show and the props for the other one. Yearly dance shows that I'm in or normally attend are broadcasting video archive of previous years. I do still ha